The French Lieutenant's Woman

The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981)

Reading the last one hundred
pages of John Fowles's “The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is like being caught in
a fictional labyrinth. We think we know where we stand in the story, and who
the characters are and what possibilities are open to them, and then Fowles begins
an astonishing series of surprises. He turns his story inside out, suggesting
first one ending, then another, always in a way that forces us to rethink
everything that has gone before. That complex structure was long thought to
make Fowles's novel unfilmable. How could his fictional surprises, depending on
the relationship between reader and omniscient narrator, be translated into the
more literal nature of film? One of the directors who tried to lick “The French
Lieutenant’s Woman” was John Frankenheimer, who complained: "There is no
way you can film the book. You can tell the same story in a movie, of course,
but not in the same way. And how Fowles tells his story is what makes the book
so good." That seemed to be the final verdict, until the British playwright
Harold Pinter tackled the project.

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Pinter's previous screenplays, such as “Accident”
and “The Go-Between,” are known for a mastery of ambiguity, for a willingness
to approach the audience on more than one level of reality, and what he and
director Karel Reisz have done with their film, “The French Lieutenant’s Woman,”
is both simple and brilliant. They have frankly discarded the multi-layered
fictional devices of John Fowles, and tried to create a new cinematic approach
that will achieve the same ambiguity. Fowles made us stand at a distance from
his two doomed lovers, Sarah and Charles. He told their story, of a passion
that was forbidden by the full weight of Victorian convention, and then he
invited us to stand back and view that passion in terms of facts and statistics
about, well, Victorian passions in general. Pinter and Reisz create a similar
distance in their movie by telling us two parallel stories. In one of them,
Sarah Woodruff (Meryl Streep) still keeps her forlorn vigil for the French lieutenant
who loved and abandoned her, and she still plays her intriguing cat-and-mouse
game with the obsessed young man (Jeremy Irons) who must possess her.

In the other story, set in the present, two
actors named Anna and Mike are playing Sarah and Charles. And Anna and Mike are
also having a forbidden affair, albeit a more conventional one. For the length
of the movie's shooting schedule, they are lovers offscreen as well as on. But
eventually Mike will return to his family and Anna to her lover.

This is a device that works, I think.
Frankenheimer was right in arguing that just telling the Victorian love story
would leave you with É just a Victorian love story. The modern framing story
places the Victorian lovers in ironic relief. Everything they say and do has
another level of meaning, because we know the "real" relationship
between the actors themselves. Reisz opens his film with a shot that boldly
states his approach: We see Streep in costume for her role as Sarah, attended
by a movie makeup woman. A clapboard marks the scene, and then Streep walks
into the movie's re-creation of the British coastal village of Lyme Regis.

"It's only a movie," this shot informs
us. But, of course, it's all only a movie, including the story about the modern
actors. And this confusion of fact and fiction interlocks perfectly with the
psychological games played in the Victorian story by Sarah Woodruff herself.

The French lieutenant's woman is one of the most
intriguing characters in recent fiction. She is not only apparently the victim
of Victorian sexism, but also (as Charles discovers) its manipulator and
master. She cleverly uses the conventions that would limit her, as a means of
obtaining personal freedom and power over men. At least that is one way to look
at what she does. Readers of the novel will know there are others.

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“The French Lieutenant’s Woman” is a beautiful
film to look at, and remarkably well-acted. Streep was showered with praise for
her remarkable double performance, and she deserved it. She is offhandedly contemporary
one moment, and then gloriously, theatrically Victorian the next. Opposite her,
Jeremy Irons is authoritative and convincingly bedeviled as the man who is
frustrated by both of Streep's characters. The movie's a challenge to our
intelligence, takes delight in playing with our expectations, and has one other
considerable achievement as well: It entertains admirers of Fowles's novel, but
does not reveal the book's secrets. If you see the movie, the book will still
surprise you, and that's as it should be.

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